Show Notes
While the larger, more impressive or charismatic animal and plant species often receive the most attention, the natural world is filled with lesser-known or even misunderstood organisms without which life on planet Earth would look very different indeed.
If you’d like to learn how plankton plays a vital role in regulating the health of the entire planet, how, despite being a bit icky, parasites play an essential part in helping the ecosystems they live in thrive, or why we have many fascinating lessons to learn from the different strategies animals use to raise their young, why not check out the four-part Nature’s Unsung Heroes miniseries starting Friday 5th June! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Sometimes, no matter how busy we are or how hard we work, when we look back on our day, it can seem like we didn’t really achieve very much. Why is this and what can we do to make more effective use of our time? Could the answer be simply tuning into our bodies’ and minds’ natural rhythms – more specifically the ultradian rhythm, the 90-minute cycles of attention and alertness that oscillate throughout the day?
For many of us, maths is simply a subject we studied at school to help us learn how to count, add one thing to another, and carry out everyday tasks such as managing our personal finances. But if we look more deeply, maths has underpinned the way that humans understand and interpret the world for thousands of years. Without our knowledge of maths, we’d have no smartphones and no internet, our buildings wouldn’t stay standing up, and we’d know very little about the wider Universe we live in.
For those of us who live in towns and cities, bogs may seem to be a rare environmental relic left over from times gone by, or perhaps something we’ve only encountered onscreen in spooky fantasy movies. The fact is that these peat-rich, often otherworldly landscapes are found in almost every corner of the globe, have had a deep influence on the development of human culture, and act as one of the planet’s unsung heroes in the fight against climate change.
From the neatly curated English country garden to the wild jungles of the Amazon, the Earth is host to a staggeringly diverse range of plant life. One of the key reasons for the great evolutionary success of plants is the wide-ranging versatility and utility of the leaves that grow on them.
Every built environment we spend our time in, our homes, offices, music venues or sports stadiums – is designed and constructed after hours of consideration about form and function. Oftentimes, less consideration is given to the impact this has on the health of the planet.